As someone below said, "great in theory, lousy in practice", though the problem isn't griefers. The problem is that persistant storylines and such sound great when you're starting, but offer far less benefit to grinding the story than grinding for yourself. In short, few players really get into advancing the story in their direction. If you force players to adhere to the story arc, you cut your pool of players to nothing; if you don't force players to do so, the ones who don't play the story get pissed off when the game world changes in response to story events, if they're not actively gaming the story for their own benefit. Bartle goes into a lot of detail on this in Designing Virtual Worlds, and how every MMOG starts out with a plan to have a world-spanning story that has great consequences, thus putting the players inside a strong narrative; in every case, they water down the story to meaninglessness just because enough players don't play the story in good faith.
The best example I've seen of your idea is Eve Online, where major corporate wars have significant effects on the availability of space due to corporate allegiance. However, Eve's subscriber base is still pretty minor, comparatively, and this is one the things that tends to cap it.
He's being charged with Witness Tampering. What's not clear? The defendent (allegedly) had Rombom locate the government's CI against him, and then try to intimidate the informant by turning his in-laws against him; exerting any pressure on a witness is illegal. I'm surprised they're not charging him with impersonating a law enforcement officer, too.
When the software starts, it logs its patch level and configuration, but not its hotfix level. Since we're very responsive to bug reports from our customers, our software is invariability hotfixed in the customer's environment. The hotfix level can make a significant difference in functionality so knowing it is crucial to troubleshooting issues. All we want is for the hotfix level to be logged with the patch number, and the director's presentation succeeded in getting that functionality included in the next version.
I work in support for a tech company that sells large software packages to Fortune 500 companies. The director of Support made a presentation on software maintainability to the Engineering department in which he displayed a spreadsheet showing that the fact that our binaries can't report their hotfix level (our customers always end up running hotfixed binaries) adds an average of 5 minutes to every support case while we determine the hotfix level, with a cost to end users at around $100,000 a year in lost productivity for production down issues. That was one of several areas he identified where the lack of engineering the software for the purpose of supportability had a calculable cost to customers.
Beyond code maintainability for future engineers, think about the job of the support engineer who's the human face on your software over the years. Think about how the company and the software looks while the support engineer asks for things like the binary size to determine the hotfix level, or says "if we logged that, we would know; let me send you an instrumented build." Especially for software maintained by IT departments, the longer impression of your software is determined by how effective your support engineers are, and how effective they appear to be to the customer.
It's a fair argument, against which I can point out Eve Online, and the fact that the development costs of an 'A' client vs. a 'B' client (A for current machines, B for older) would be recouped by keeping ongoing subscription fees at a constant level vs. watching it taper off.
Eve bundles its graphics updates in its regular patches that aren't much larger than WoW's regular patches. I can only blame a fairly shortsighted business decision ("Why spend money when we're not losing customers?").
Eve is actually an interesting case study in how a game can retain relevence by maintaining current graphics standards. Over 5 years old, Eve is at a high point in its membership with over 100,000 players (and still growing), and the game looks as current as possible. In the dev blog, they say that the next patch will include high dynamic range rendering (which will be particularly applicable in a space environment where an asteroid can unmask a nearby star, for example).
Granted, there's nothing procedural about this, and the fact that Eve is a MMO means that it's in an ideal position to keep the graphics at current standards. It still demonstrates that games don't have to age past relevence, and makes on wonder why Everquest didn't tyr to keep up. Especially for MMOs, there's no reason they have to fall behind.
Rather than an independent authority, the N.S.A. already has extensive experience with Linux due to developing SELinux, and also has a mandate to evaluate and provide secure computing solutions to the U.S. public. Just have them do it.
The SEC has launched a very wide ranging inquiry that's touching virtually every major tech company from the 90s. The issue is the backdating of stock options to the stock's lowest price in the period, and how that was accounted for financially. It's not clear what's been done wrong by anyone, and looks like some fairly technical accounting issues will result in some fines for improper handling of the charges. Regardless, this is cleanup of the wild west 90s, when everyone was handing out options like candy. It says nothing about Take Two that it doesn't likewise say about every dot com.
On the question of keels, wouldn't heeling the rudder over correct for the absence, much a plane's does to correct for crosswinds? Or would that be insufficient if the sail is providing too much force?
And why does the ship need a deeper draft, especially since they'd still have the engines to use alone getting into and out of port?
I'm certain that any temptation Lizzie might entertain is immediately quashed by the knowledge that the Windsors receive a royal bungload of money from the government for their maintenance. Attempts in the past to reduce that funding have been met with shocked appeals to the commoners about preserving the majesty of the crown; the commoners eat that shit up like blood pudding, apparently.
Then you don't really accept your responsibility under your Majesty's laws, do you? It was Queenie herself who signed the law agreeing to the extradition treaty.
At our facility in California, the servers had no server room, they were simply out in the open in the front office. I convinced them to move the servers to an unused office and install an air conditioner that should have been sufficient to keep it cool.
A week after the move, the boxes started shutting down, and we were called. I had the person on the phone who'd been responsible for the move, to go into the new server room.
"It's hot in here."
"Why is it hot? You were supposed to install an air conditioner!"
"Well, we're trying to save money, so we just bought a swamp cooler instead." A swamp cooler is, in other respects, an ingenious device for cooling in hot climates at a minimum expense. Imagine a fan with a water reservoir below it, and a sheet of foam running up one side, all the way down into the reservoir; capilliary action draws water up through the foam, where moving air evaporates it and humidifies the room.
After banging my head on the desk for a few minutes, I asked "Was the swamp cooler not on?"
"No," he said, "we have to turn it off now and then because of all the condensation on the walls."
I was IT manager of a department of four at a manufacturer. A user three cubicles away called me and said "My computer is frozen". I stood up, and Jan was also standing up, looking at me. I said "Can you move your mouse?" She replied "Yes," and picked up the mouse, waving it in the air so I could see that its mobility was unimpaired.
The fault in your analogy is that, while statistics can't tell you what the next run of cards will be, gamblers and mathematicians do use statistics to win over time. I read a story on Wired a few years ago about gambling companies run by mathematicians who sent employees to casinos with briefcases carrying $100,000 in cash, and a statistically derived system; the employee spent eight hours playing blackjack and walked out with $104,000 consistently, making it a profitable business (the casinos didn't mind because they weren't taking huge losses, and the presence of these small winners was actually good for business by making the casino look busy and giving non-system players the idea that they could win).
The criticism in the article is that string theory, lacking testable predictive power, has no practical payoff like that, so it's not science.
What's pointed out in the linked article is that string theory is untestable in principle, at least some parts. Where the theory predicts a certain set of circumstances, if those circumstances are absent or impossible in our universe, they are, by definition, necessary in another. If that's the case, then string theory can't tell us anything useful about our universe specifically. If that's true, then it's useless as science--just so much mathematical wanking, like positing a world where 1 = 2.
I have no clue if this is true, but that's the gist of the article, and many other criticisms I've heard of string theory.
Be aware that the website hosting the article is a far-right broadsheet, the Canadian equivalent of Free Republic. Their agenda is strongly anti-global-warming, which doesn't necessarily discredit the article, but does suggest that one should view it with the same scepticism as one views the recent 'ads' by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Part of the reason spreadsheets are so commonly used is that they're flexible. The term "worksheet" has lost all meaning, since the fact that it's on a computer gives the false impression that it has some kind of authority.
At my last employer, finances were worked out on spreadsheets, and once approved, the totals were entered into a financial system that held them as approved figures requiring various permissions to change. Continuing to run your business on spreadsheets is like leaving your screenplay as a bunch of sticky notes on a whiteboard, never committing it to an approved draft.
Turning Excel into a frontend for a database (which we also did) has the drawback of killing the flexibility of the working surface that makes it so attractive in the first place. This isn't an interface issue, it's a procedures issue, and spreadsheet mistakes are nothing more than adding machine mistakes writ large. The solution to be had is a policy declaring spreadsheets as by definition non-final, and having your database form be the authoritative record.
I wonder if hotmail, yahoo and gmail are already doing this?
Interesting question. On the one hand, it's probably easier to drop some sort of monitoring server into a back room; on the other hand, there are far more savvy geeks around of a techno-libertarian bent who would happily squeel if they detected such a thing. If "AT&T monitoring phone traffic" generates an uproar, imagine the result of the headline "Yahoo monitoring mailboxes for NSA".
Not that I'm at all happy about the monitoring, but in fairness, would the NSA/FBI report massive success with the data mining? Doing so would inform terrorists (drug dealers, lesbians, Democrats) that the simple pattern of their phone calls can identify them, forcing them to change their methods of communications, undermining the success of the program. It might be sufficient for them to publicly leak stories that the program isn't working while reporting to the government that it's actually quite successful. It certainly wouldn't be the first time disinformation has been used.
An interesting aside: as reported by Bruce Schneier, al Qaeda members avoid Echelon by using shared Hotmail accounts. Rather than sending email, they create drafts and save them, and have a running conversation in the draft before deleting it. Not sending the email means the email doesn't trigger midpoint monitoring. Would they be doing that if they didn't know about Echelon?
Slashdot Mirror
As someone below said, "great in theory, lousy in practice", though the problem isn't griefers. The problem is that persistant storylines and such sound great when you're starting, but offer far less benefit to grinding the story than grinding for yourself. In short, few players really get into advancing the story in their direction. If you force players to adhere to the story arc, you cut your pool of players to nothing; if you don't force players to do so, the ones who don't play the story get pissed off when the game world changes in response to story events, if they're not actively gaming the story for their own benefit. Bartle goes into a lot of detail on this in Designing Virtual Worlds, and how every MMOG starts out with a plan to have a world-spanning story that has great consequences, thus putting the players inside a strong narrative; in every case, they water down the story to meaninglessness just because enough players don't play the story in good faith.
The best example I've seen of your idea is Eve Online, where major corporate wars have significant effects on the availability of space due to corporate allegiance. However, Eve's subscriber base is still pretty minor, comparatively, and this is one the things that tends to cap it.
He's being charged with Witness Tampering. What's not clear? The defendent (allegedly) had Rombom locate the government's CI against him, and then try to intimidate the informant by turning his in-laws against him; exerting any pressure on a witness is illegal. I'm surprised they're not charging him with impersonating a law enforcement officer, too.
When the software starts, it logs its patch level and configuration, but not its hotfix level. Since we're very responsive to bug reports from our customers, our software is invariability hotfixed in the customer's environment. The hotfix level can make a significant difference in functionality so knowing it is crucial to troubleshooting issues. All we want is for the hotfix level to be logged with the patch number, and the director's presentation succeeded in getting that functionality included in the next version.
I work in support for a tech company that sells large software packages to Fortune 500 companies. The director of Support made a presentation on software maintainability to the Engineering department in which he displayed a spreadsheet showing that the fact that our binaries can't report their hotfix level (our customers always end up running hotfixed binaries) adds an average of 5 minutes to every support case while we determine the hotfix level, with a cost to end users at around $100,000 a year in lost productivity for production down issues. That was one of several areas he identified where the lack of engineering the software for the purpose of supportability had a calculable cost to customers.
Beyond code maintainability for future engineers, think about the job of the support engineer who's the human face on your software over the years. Think about how the company and the software looks while the support engineer asks for things like the binary size to determine the hotfix level, or says "if we logged that, we would know; let me send you an instrumented build." Especially for software maintained by IT departments, the longer impression of your software is determined by how effective your support engineers are, and how effective they appear to be to the customer.
What's the difference between having one computer with five installations of Vista on it via VMWare, and having five computers with Vista on each?
The VMWare version only costs for one copy.
You can host Windows in it. There's never been any restriction in VMWare on running Windows in particular versions.
It's a fair argument, against which I can point out Eve Online, and the fact that the development costs of an 'A' client vs. a 'B' client (A for current machines, B for older) would be recouped by keeping ongoing subscription fees at a constant level vs. watching it taper off.
Eve bundles its graphics updates in its regular patches that aren't much larger than WoW's regular patches. I can only blame a fairly shortsighted business decision ("Why spend money when we're not losing customers?").
Eve is actually an interesting case study in how a game can retain relevence by maintaining current graphics standards. Over 5 years old, Eve is at a high point in its membership with over 100,000 players (and still growing), and the game looks as current as possible. In the dev blog, they say that the next patch will include high dynamic range rendering (which will be particularly applicable in a space environment where an asteroid can unmask a nearby star, for example).
Granted, there's nothing procedural about this, and the fact that Eve is a MMO means that it's in an ideal position to keep the graphics at current standards. It still demonstrates that games don't have to age past relevence, and makes on wonder why Everquest didn't tyr to keep up. Especially for MMOs, there's no reason they have to fall behind.
Rather than an independent authority, the N.S.A. already has extensive experience with Linux due to developing SELinux, and also has a mandate to evaluate and provide secure computing solutions to the U.S. public. Just have them do it.
The SEC has launched a very wide ranging inquiry that's touching virtually every major tech company from the 90s. The issue is the backdating of stock options to the stock's lowest price in the period, and how that was accounted for financially. It's not clear what's been done wrong by anyone, and looks like some fairly technical accounting issues will result in some fines for improper handling of the charges. Regardless, this is cleanup of the wild west 90s, when everyone was handing out options like candy. It says nothing about Take Two that it doesn't likewise say about every dot com.
On the question of keels, wouldn't heeling the rudder over correct for the absence, much a plane's does to correct for crosswinds? Or would that be insufficient if the sail is providing too much force?
And why does the ship need a deeper draft, especially since they'd still have the engines to use alone getting into and out of port?
I'm certain that any temptation Lizzie might entertain is immediately quashed by the knowledge that the Windsors receive a royal bungload of money from the government for their maintenance. Attempts in the past to reduce that funding have been met with shocked appeals to the commoners about preserving the majesty of the crown; the commoners eat that shit up like blood pudding, apparently.
Then you don't really accept your responsibility under your Majesty's laws, do you? It was Queenie herself who signed the law agreeing to the extradition treaty.
What's your point? That this justifies racial profiling on the flimsiest grounds and to the weakest effects?
At our facility in California, the servers had no server room, they were simply out in the open in the front office. I convinced them to move the servers to an unused office and install an air conditioner that should have been sufficient to keep it cool.
A week after the move, the boxes started shutting down, and we were called. I had the person on the phone who'd been responsible for the move, to go into the new server room.
"It's hot in here."
"Why is it hot? You were supposed to install an air conditioner!"
"Well, we're trying to save money, so we just bought a swamp cooler instead." A swamp cooler is, in other respects, an ingenious device for cooling in hot climates at a minimum expense. Imagine a fan with a water reservoir below it, and a sheet of foam running up one side, all the way down into the reservoir; capilliary action draws water up through the foam, where moving air evaporates it and humidifies the room.
After banging my head on the desk for a few minutes, I asked "Was the swamp cooler not on?"
"No," he said, "we have to turn it off now and then because of all the condensation on the walls."
I was IT manager of a department of four at a manufacturer. A user three cubicles away called me and said "My computer is frozen". I stood up, and Jan was also standing up, looking at me. I said "Can you move your mouse?" She replied "Yes," and picked up the mouse, waving it in the air so I could see that its mobility was unimpaired.
...is with the absence of any sense of responsibility for the consequences.
"It's an addiction, no doubt about that," said Mr. Sharma
The fault in your analogy is that, while statistics can't tell you what the next run of cards will be, gamblers and mathematicians do use statistics to win over time. I read a story on Wired a few years ago about gambling companies run by mathematicians who sent employees to casinos with briefcases carrying $100,000 in cash, and a statistically derived system; the employee spent eight hours playing blackjack and walked out with $104,000 consistently, making it a profitable business (the casinos didn't mind because they weren't taking huge losses, and the presence of these small winners was actually good for business by making the casino look busy and giving non-system players the idea that they could win).
The criticism in the article is that string theory, lacking testable predictive power, has no practical payoff like that, so it's not science.
What's pointed out in the linked article is that string theory is untestable in principle, at least some parts. Where the theory predicts a certain set of circumstances, if those circumstances are absent or impossible in our universe, they are, by definition, necessary in another. If that's the case, then string theory can't tell us anything useful about our universe specifically. If that's true, then it's useless as science--just so much mathematical wanking, like positing a world where 1 = 2.
I have no clue if this is true, but that's the gist of the article, and many other criticisms I've heard of string theory.
Be aware that the website hosting the article is a far-right broadsheet, the Canadian equivalent of Free Republic. Their agenda is strongly anti-global-warming, which doesn't necessarily discredit the article, but does suggest that one should view it with the same scepticism as one views the recent 'ads' by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Part of the reason spreadsheets are so commonly used is that they're flexible. The term "worksheet" has lost all meaning, since the fact that it's on a computer gives the false impression that it has some kind of authority.
At my last employer, finances were worked out on spreadsheets, and once approved, the totals were entered into a financial system that held them as approved figures requiring various permissions to change. Continuing to run your business on spreadsheets is like leaving your screenplay as a bunch of sticky notes on a whiteboard, never committing it to an approved draft.
Turning Excel into a frontend for a database (which we also did) has the drawback of killing the flexibility of the working surface that makes it so attractive in the first place. This isn't an interface issue, it's a procedures issue, and spreadsheet mistakes are nothing more than adding machine mistakes writ large. The solution to be had is a policy declaring spreadsheets as by definition non-final, and having your database form be the authoritative record.
The crucial difference being that race is a protected class in anti-discrimination legislation, while employer is not.
I wonder if hotmail, yahoo and gmail are already doing this?
Interesting question. On the one hand, it's probably easier to drop some sort of monitoring server into a back room; on the other hand, there are far more savvy geeks around of a techno-libertarian bent who would happily squeel if they detected such a thing. If "AT&T monitoring phone traffic" generates an uproar, imagine the result of the headline "Yahoo monitoring mailboxes for NSA".
Not that I'm at all happy about the monitoring, but in fairness, would the NSA/FBI report massive success with the data mining? Doing so would inform terrorists (drug dealers, lesbians, Democrats) that the simple pattern of their phone calls can identify them, forcing them to change their methods of communications, undermining the success of the program. It might be sufficient for them to publicly leak stories that the program isn't working while reporting to the government that it's actually quite successful. It certainly wouldn't be the first time disinformation has been used.
An interesting aside: as reported by Bruce Schneier, al Qaeda members avoid Echelon by using shared Hotmail accounts. Rather than sending email, they create drafts and save them, and have a running conversation in the draft before deleting it. Not sending the email means the email doesn't trigger midpoint monitoring. Would they be doing that if they didn't know about Echelon?
The rule that the winner is the one sodomizing the loser is strictly optional, according to the article.